Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

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sensibility, 30 the second takes it up in
a more radical fashion. Here Giedion
opposes in an explicit manner traditional
ideas such as attributing to the
house an eternal value. Instead he argues,
“The house is a value of use. It
is to be written off and amortized
within a measurable time.” 31 This is
feasible, according to Giedion, when
building production is organized on
an industrial basis, so that building
costs and rents are reduced. Houses
should not look like fortresses; rather,
they should allow for a life that requires
plenty of light and wants
everything to be spacious and flexible.
Houses should be open; they
should reflect the contemporary
mentality that perceives all aspects
of life as interpenetrating: “Today we
need a house, that corresponds in
its entire structure to our bodily feeling
as it is influenced and liberated
through sports, gymnastics, and a
sensuous way of life: light, transparent, movable. Consequentially, this open house
also signifies a reflection of the contemporary mental condition: there are no longer
separate affairs, all domains interpenetrate.” 32 “Architecture” according to
László Moholy-Nagy.
(Concluding illustration in
Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material
zu Architektur; photo:
Jan Kamman/Schiedam.)
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Giedion explicitly refers in this text to
Sant’Elia, whose idea it was that a house should only last one generation. In the manifesto
that Sant’Elia wrote with Marinetti in 1914 it is indeed stated:
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We have lost the sense of the monumental, of the heavy, of the static;
we have enriched our sensibility by a taste of the light, the practical, the
ephemeral and the swift. ... An architecture so conceived cannot give
birth to any three-dimensional or linear habit, because the fundamental
characteristics of Futurist architecture will be obsolescence and transience.
Houses will last less long than we. Each generation will have to
build its own city. 33
Nowhere else in Giedion’s work is this concept of deliberate transitoriness so
emphatically stated as in Befreites Wohnen, a book that in terms of its rhetorical
structure also has the character of a manifesto. Openness, lightness, and flexibility
are associated here with the other slogan words of the New Building: rationality,